3. Ask the same dumb questions of everybody, especially specialists and attorneys who would know what it actually means, until you understand it.

4. Look it up, but don’t expect that to make any sense of it until you can form the right questions to ask using the right words to convey what you are asking.

5. Expect to communicate poorly until the basic principles start to gel in your mind – but keep trying until you get the communication right.

6. Don’t expect anybody to believe you know anything about anything – it won’t be about that anyway. It will be about someone else proving they know more than you do – so let them.

7. Learning is the one thing that can’t be fudged, it can’t be cooked to appear to be what it isn’t. The skills of learning are yours simply by applying them.

8. If you know a lot about something – remember this: you can’t now, nor ever know everything about it. There will always be more to remember than you have ever thought to ask about it and there will always be more to learn about any one thing than what you’ve ever considered about it.

9. There will always, always, always be times that appear to be complicated which are indeed complicated. It is the magic of being alive as a human being that the capacity exists within each of us to challenge the reality before us and apply ourselves to it despite its complexity and difficulty.

10. Whatever can be learned, can be mastered and there will still be more to know and to learn about it. There will always be ways to apply new ideas and new information and new processes and new paradigms to that mastery.

11. If you ask, the only fool is the one who pretended to know and didn’t – not you or me for accepting the limitations of knowledge and sought to know more.

12. Living is not a game, not a premise easily dismissed and not a practice session for something else. It is lived in the now with all the fullness and depth of the entire universe available. It doesn’t matter what people think about that – living is intrinsically powerful by virtue of itself regardless of anything else. What you do with it is up to you.